S02E19 Folsom Prison Blues

Episode Summary

Sam and Dean are arrested for breaking and entering in Arkansas. Once they’re in the county jail, it is revealed that Dean planned being caught because their dad’s former army colleague Deacon asked them for help. Deacon suspects that a ghost from an old cell block kills people in the prison. Because Deacon saved their father’s life, Sam and Dean start to investigate as inmates – even though FBI agent Henriksen is keen on trying them for, among other things, murders and the desecration of numerous graves. A psychopathic killer from the old cell block that died from a heart attack, as all the victims do, turns out to be a false lead. After Dean is attacked by a ghost that looked like a nurse, the Winchesters start to look for other explanations. Through the help of a „regular“ at the prison they find out about a nurse called Glockner who was said to kill some of the prisoners she was supposed to treat. With the help of Deacon and their public defender Sam and Dean escape prison and salt and burn the bones of Glockner. The FBI, meanwhile, was sent to the wrong graveyard by Sam and Dean’s lawyer.

Commentary

I spent a lot of time thinking about this episode because I felt there was so much content between the lines and so many hints and hunches to follow. In the end, there were so many thoughts in my head that I couldn’t make sense of them anymore. I had to take a step back and look at the episode less closely and ended up repeating in my head what most episodes repeat at the beginning: the Winchester motto.

Saving lives, hunting things, the family business.

„Folsom Prison Blues“, more than any other episode so far, deals with the motivation behind Sam and Dean’s demon hunting activities. At the beginning of the series we learn about the deaths of their mother and Sam’s girlfriend but it is clear that there is more to it than revenge or even closure. It’s about saving lives, hunting things, the family business and, most importantly, what lies beyond.

First of all, the lives that are to be saved are often specified to be the lives of innocents. In „Folsom Prison Blues“, however, the innocence of certain victims is more than questionable. In fact, the ghost of nurse Glockner specifically targets people who broke the law, inmates as well as corrupted guards, thus guilty rather than innocent people. Her judgement, however, is doubted even before we learn about her, or before Dean becomes a target. While Sam calls Dean out on calling the victims in the prison innocents whose life they’re supposed to save – according to the family motto – Dean reaffirms that the victims of a vengeful spirit are (always) innocent. The family motto, then, is less easy or superficial than it sounds. Innocence is not as clear-cut as the law might make it seem sometimes and every life is worth saving (to a certain degree). Thus, the implied heroism in the first part of the motto loses some of its convincing motivational force which is to say, the Winchesters aren’t hunting things for purely heroic reasons and the rewards that might go with it.
A similarly loose rather than strict interpretation also applies to the second part of the Winchester motto that explicitly refers to the hunt, specifically the hunting of things. Sometimes, these „things“ they hunt aren’t things but real people, such as in S02E17 „Heart“, who cannot be saved and sometimes hunting spirits means freeing them, c.f., S02E16 „Roadkill“. And then there are the times where the „things“ become allies or business partners (S02E08 „Crossroad Blues“) or turn out to be your brother. Thus it becomes clear that the classic thrill of the hunt (that a lot of wealthy men and women seem to experience when shooting rare, captivated animals on the African continent) and the dichotomy of the hunter and the hunted is lacking from Dean’s and Sam’s adventures thus making it an unlikely motivator.
So far, neither the „public reward“ (often said to be the defining characteristic as well as driving force of heroism) of saving innocents and experiencing their gratitude nor the hunting-related adrenaline rush can fully explain why Sam and Dean do what they do. And so we continute to the last part of the motto, the family business, and its particular relevance for „Folsom Prison Blues“. This episode sheds light on what else drives Sam and Dean by highlighting what „the family business“ means – and especially what it means to Sam and Dean. Sam is clearly more sceptical of doing the family business according to Dean’s plan and has a hard time understanding why they should risk their lives (the FBI is following them closely after all) for an old and seemingly distant friend of their late father. Dean, on the other hand, stresses the debt they owe to Deacon because he saved their father’s life. One might argue here that John Winchester’s military education affected his sons, particularly Dean, on more than just a physical level. Semper fidelis, „always faithful“, the motto of the United States Marine Corps, the military unit John and Deacon served in, seems to shape Sam’s and Dean’s actions significantly albeit differently. While Sam displays a strong sense of family and responsibility for his relatives, Dean goes one step further by acknowledging his responsibility not only for his family but also for their debts, even beyond death – always, as in semper fidelis. The family, then, is what matters most and what drives them. Thus the family business is not just a kind of traditional profession but more of a set of ideals the Winchesters live by and some of those say they should hunt down those who hurt other people, that is, their extended, almost global, family.

Summing up the arguments above, „Folsom Prison Blues“ particularly highlights the last part of the Winchester motto, that is, the importance of family and friendship for the business. After all, they only succeed in this episode through the help of, more or less close, friends, namely Deacon and Mara Daniels, the defense lawyer. Thus it becomes clear that as solitary as hunters and their lives might seem, what drives them and what helps them fight the dark forces are their families – however those might be defined.

S02E18 Hollywood Babylon

Episode Summary

Dean and Sam go to Los Angeles to investigate a horror film set in a Hollywood studio. After they find out that the first death had been staged as a publicity stunt the producer of the film dies. What looks like a suicide turns out to be an exact copy of the death of a black-and-white film starlet. While the Winchesters salt and burn her bones another person dies on the set. It is only when Sam recognises the incantations in the film that he and Dean see the realism in the script. It turns out that the original script writer Walter turned what he learned about black magic into a film script and went on to punish the people who tampered with it and turned it into a horror flick. In the end, the ghosts he summoned and forced to kill take gruesome revenge on Walter.

Commentary

Imagine a cabin in the woods. The light from the full moon is dim and the swing on the front porch screeches in an unnatural breeze. When a sudden light beam disturbs the dark scenery, we see a young and attractive woman who is looking for her friends, unaware of the horror that lies in front of her. When her torch light finally finds a, literal, part of her friends a scream p- Cut! What the hell was that?! Thus, or similar, begins the Supernatural version of meta.

Put simply, the term “meta” refers to something that goes above or beyond a particular thing. The term metalanguage, for example, is used to describe the words used to describe a language, i.e., its grammar. To create a meta-level in their works writers, for instance, may use self-reference. Sometimes such a technique “breaks the fourth wall”, see also No Fourth Wall at TV Tropes. The French theorist Jean-François Lyotard popularised the term meta-narratives (also grand narratives) which, in a nutshell, describe our theories about the world, that is, theories that go „above and beyond“ the tangible reality. I don’t want to go too much into his theory, Wikipedia has a quite adequate summary if anyone’s interested, so it is enough if we think of meta-narratives as unfinished, ever changing blueprints of ideas, such as the “idea” of the horror genre, as will be discussed here. Lyotard goes on to define postmodernism, his actual topic, as being incredulous towards such meta-narratives. There are many different ways of questioning a meta-narrative or an idea. In the Fantastic genre, Terry Pratchett created, among many other postmodern characters, Cohen the Barbarian, based on Conan the Barbarian, that questions and undermines the stereotypical burly action hero. The Scary Movie series, too, creates a kind of parody, mostly by means of references to well-known horror films. Supernatural’s approach to the meta-narrative of the horror genre lies somewhere between those two. It is neither as elaborate and witty as Pratchett’s Discworld series (it is mostly this one particular episode, anyway), nor quite as silly a spoof as the Scary Movies. Supernatural creates a dense network of overlapping levels of references, meta-levels, that places the series among its precursors in the horror genre in a casual, pragmatic way, a style that seems to shape the series so far, that involves a lot of, metaphorical, winking. Rather than trying to write down a list of references here, which would not be exhaustive – or that interesting, really, I will look at the many different meta-levels presented in this episode, how they interact and what they tell us about Supernatural.

First of all, there are several instances where “real” events or things are mentioned during the episode, such as the 1987 film Three Men and a Baby Dean mentions but also Metalstorm or Boogeyman. Some of these are linked to the Supernatural universe. Boogeyman, for example, was written by Eric Kripke, creator of Supernatural, and McG is both a fictional director in Hollywood Babylon and one of the real producers of the Supernatural series. He is also the director of the film Charlie’s Angels – in the series and in real life. Even further go the references within the series to the series itself. They are clearly self-referential and thus create a Supernatural meta-level. My favourite example are the posters on the wall of the writer’s office where, for example, the truck from Route 666 (S01E13) advertises the film Monster Truck.

The most significant reference, however, can be found in the title of the episode. Hollywood and Babylon both refer to important cultural sites during their respective era. Thus, unsurprisingly, they both also attracted businessmen and women, some of which were more shady than others. It is not until almost the very end, however, that some light is shed on the relevance of the title for the episode. Before Walter, the original script writer, summons the spirits to finish off the studio writer who tore up his text, the following dialogue (excerpt) takes place:

Walter: “Hell, we could have gotten it right for the first time ever in this whorehouse of a town!”
Martin: “Who gives a rat’s ass about real?”

Walter’s statement likens LA, or, rather, Hollywood, to the Whore(house) of Babylon and Martin not only does not deny that but in his stereotypical Hollywood snobbery reinforces that point of view. The effect of this parallel is twofold. First of all, it further confirms Supernatural’s place in the history of the horror genre that was established through various references and tropes throughout the episode (some of which were mentioned above). It does so by, on the one hand, actually referring to antique history and, on the other hand, through the allusion to sexuality, for instance, that is a recurring trope of horror classics, such as the often discussed vampires.

Secondly, it places the universe of Supernatural in the same dark cesspit as the biblical Babylon, that is, in a Hollywood studio. It is interesting to see how well the Winchester brothers fit into such a place. Once they are off the tourist train, nobody questions their presence. What is more, their enquiries and, more generally, the way they interact with the crew doesn’t raise any eyebrows – at least not until they start walking around with shotguns. While Sam just doesn’t stand out, Dean seems to feel right at home. It stands to reason that their different adaptive capacities reflect their respective attitude to demon hunting. Sam, on the one hand, has a clear goal he wants to achieve. For Dean, on the other hand, demons are his job, the hunters, if not his family, at least his kind of people. He is “one hell of a PA”, as Tara puts it, as well as one hell of a demon hunter.

This conclusion is underlined by the shot of Sam and Dean walking towards the sunset, a trope TV Tropes introduces as follows:

“It’s the end of the movie and The Drifter has to be moving on. There are other people in trouble, other wrongs to right, other paths to follow. He saddles up his horse and rides west into the setting sun. The townspeople look on as his figure, silhouetted against the orange disk, disappears into the horizon. The music swells and ‚The End‘ appears.“

The Winchesters, however, aren’t your typical heroes. Their postmodern stories have more in common with the labyrinthine layouts of many a crooked Gothic castle than the open prairie of the West with the clearly defined good, bad and ugly. Thus the fake sunset is revealed to be a prop and rolled away, opening up the path for more Supernatural chaos.